‘Death Wish’ updated with more guns, cell phones and revenge

Bruce Willis is an ER doctor turned vigilante after an attack on his wife and daughter in the remake of “Death Wish.”

Photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer

The new “Death Wish” will never have the social impact that the original “Death Wish” had in 1974, but this remake finds smart ways to update the story. For those too young to remember, it’s the tale of a pacifist, upper-middle-class man who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is put into a coma.

Unless you lived through the 1970s, it’s hard to imagine the effect the original “Death Wish” had on audiences of its time. Coming as it did, just as crime was spiking in every major city, the movie’s depiction of one man fighting back had audiences cheering — not just at the end of the movie, but every time its star, Charles Bronson, shot some mugger on the street or thugs on the subway. That’s how rattled people were about violent crime in those days.

To remake “Death Wish” outside such a powerful social context is risky, but screenwriter Joe Carnahan figures out ways to make it work. New York was the site of the original film, but New York is a fairly peaceful place these days, so he moves the action to Chicago. Carnahan also realizes that he’s not writing for an audience living in constant fear of crime, so he shades the movie in the direction of a revenge story. Curiously, the original “Death Wish” had no real revenge element at all.

The original Paul Kersey was a real estate developer. The new Paul Kersey is an emergency room surgeon, and he’s played by Bruce Willis. At the start of the movie, he is a very happy man. He lives in a big house with his beautiful wife (Elisabeth Shue) and loving daughter (Camila Morrone). And then one night he goes to work and a few hours later finds his wife dead on the operating table and his daughter in a coma, both victims of a burglary gone bad.

The movie reimagines most of the details of the “Death Wish” story — such as how Kersey ends up acquiring an unregistered gun and how he decides to turn vigilante — and every idea is a good one. The movie also invents the brand-new character of Frank Kersey, Paul’s brother, a not especially flashy role that’s played with lots of flash and feeling by Vincent D’Onofrio.

As someone who has seen the original “Death Wish” several times and has even shown it in classes as an example of a movie that captured its time, I appreciated the ways the new film adjusts to modern changes. It accounts for the fact that there are a lot more guns on the street these days. It recognizes that cell phones make it a lot harder for people to commit crimes without going viral on YouTube.

All the violent scenes have been completely reconceived, made more elaborate and more effective as directed by Eli Roth, though he twice indulges his tendency to overdo it. (One case involves brains splattering — but it’s probably less than a second of screen time. Perhaps you’ll blink and miss it.) Yet in another way, this “Death Wish” goes a little easy on audiences, in that the consequences of the original crime are not quite as lasting or dispiriting as before. The movie consoles as it thrills, by falling into the familiar pattern of an action film, and familiar patterns are comforting.

This isn’t a criticism, just an acknowledgment of the movie’s lack of ultimate ambition. But it has all the ambition it needs. This “Death Wish” can’t be “Death Wish” (1974). The 1974 film meant something to audiences that the new movie will never mean to us. Still, Willis is a worthy replacement for Bronson, and it can be safely said: This new movie is way better than all the “Death Wish” sequels that Bronson kept churning out, the last when he was 72.

Indeed, “Death Wish” is easily the second best “Death Wish” movie ever made, and not a distant second.

Mick LaSalle is the film critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1985. He is the author of two books on pre-censorship Hollywood, "Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood" and "Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man." Both were books of the month on Turner Classic Movies and "Complicated Women" formed the basis of a TCM documentary in 2003, narrated by Jane Fonda. He has written introductions for a number of books, including Peter Cowie's "Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star" (2009). He was a panelist at the Berlin Film Festival and has served as a panelist for eight of the last ten years at the Venice Film Festival. His latest book, a study of women in French cinema, is "The Beauty of the Real: What Hollywood Can Learn from Contemporary French Actresses."